8-6-19

 

He wanted more and he was quick to criticize Powell and Company. The very next day, the president trumped the Fed by slapping down the tariff card.

Peter Schiff talked about the president’s move in a recent podcast.

Trump took to Twitter right after the Fed announced its 25-basis point rate cut, tweeting, “What the Market wanted to hear from Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve was that this was the beginning of a lengthy and aggressive rate-cutting cycle which would keep pace with China, The European Union and other countries around the world. As usual, Powell let us down, but at least he is ending quantitative tightening, which shouldn’t have started in the first place.”

The next day, Trump announced a plan to put a 10% tariff on the remaining $300 billion of goods and products coming from China into the United States beginning Sept.

1. This is on top of the 25% tariffs already levied on $250 of imported goods. Trump also fired off a litany of complaints about Chinese performance in the trade negotiations. With that news, everybody decided that Powell-talk notwithstanding, we’re going to get more rate cuts. The Dow dropped 280 points after Trump’s tweet and gold soared more than 2%, pushing up to about $1,446.

The Fed claimed the rate cut wasn’t the beginning of a sustained rate-cutting cycle. It was called an “insurance policy.” Peter said the real insurance policy was Trump’s tariff tweet.

“I think the reason for the tweet was a lot more calculated than the financial media understands … I think what Trump was doing was trying to take out a bit of an insurance policy on rate cuts.”

Pictures of Money / Flickr

Peter noted that the Fed mentioned the rate cut was because of uncertainty in the global economy, not concerns about the US economy.Peter called that a lie, nevertheless, that’s the rhetoric coming out of the Eccles Building.

“So, if the Fed is worried about uncertainty in the global economy, why not give them something else to worry about? Why not up the ante on the tariffs? Why not throw another monkey wrench into the global economy so the Fed will be even more concerned than they were before, so just in case they were thinking about not cutting rates, now that we have these extra tariffs, well they’re definitely going to cut rates.

So, I think that the warning and the message that Trump was sending was not to China, because nothing is going to happen there. There’s no progress being made with the Chinese. The warning sign was being sent to the Fed.”

Peter said Trump didn’t really need this insurance policy. The Fed is going to cut rates.

“The economy is a mess despite what the Fed wants to say about how great it is, despite what Trump wants to say.”

As Peter pointed out, the actual economic data backs up his assertion. Just last week we got some more gloomy numbers.

Data showed the ISM manufacturing index dropped to 51.2% in July. That is the lowest level since mid-2016. Construction spending also declined by 1.3% in June. Meanwhile, jobless claims climbed modestly by 8,000 to 215,000 at the end of July.

“The data is weak, yet everyone wants to continue to pretend that the economy is strong. Well, pretty soon, they’re going to have to stop pretending.”

Peter went on to highlight some of the market reaction to Trump’s tweet, particularly the bond market.

The Fed Is At War With America

Mike Adams exposes the agenda of the private Fed as a war against the prosperity of Americans that simply want to make America great.

Google Insider: YouTube Blacklisted Results Critical of Federal Reserve

This article was sourced from TheNewAmerican

YouTube is the second-most-popular search engine in the world. It comes in right behind Google — which, interestingly enough, owns YouTube.

This writer has searched YouTube for videos showing things such as “how to change the battery in a key fob for a 2007 Volkswagen Jetta” after spending nearly an hour trying to figure out how to open the darned thing. The one-minute-thirty-seconds-long video had my problem sorted before the video was finished. And while that was great, what if the topic I was searching for was something a tad more controversial than car keys?

For most people who have had the pleasure of coming of age in a world where the answer to almost any question is literally at their fingertips, trusting Internet searches is simply natural. After all, I can know what other movies I’ve seen that actor in, the distance from my front yard to the Grand Canyon, and how many eggs the average chicken lays in a year. And all of those results are accurate and true. I search, I find, I am informed. So, searching for information on a political candidate, important issues such as abortion, or even how the Federal Reserve works should be the same, right? Wrong. Very wrong.

Trusting a particular search requires trust in the system being used to conduct that search, and Google’s trustworthiness is lousy.

As this writer has reported, Google is known to “tweak” its search algorithm to skew search results when the actual results — based on relevance and popularity of clicks — are not to the liking of the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” that Google has become. As the above-linked article shows, a video by Project Veritas includes an on-the-record interview with a senior Google engineer and reveals that Google deliberately manipulates users’ search results to fit Google’s political leanings.

Now, a new report by Breitbart News confirms that the Google/YouTube search-manipulation issue is broader and deeper than merely hiding negative search results in regard to liberal candidates.

According to an earlier Breitbart report, a YouTube insider-turned-whistleblower has revealed the existence of “a ‘blacklist’ file for ‘controversial YouTube queries,’ which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive.”

Also from that previous report: “The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.”

That “blacklist” included “abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg,” according to Breitbart. The inclusion of those terms led to an “intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for ‘abortion.’” This is, of course, in direct opposition to Congressional testimony given by Google CEO Sundar Pichai that the company does not “manually intervene” in search results, since the maintenance of the “blacklist” is manually handled by employees.

Now, it is known that — acting as a minion for the establishment — YouTube has added “Federal Reserve” to that list.

The reason? MSNBC host Chris Hayes complained on Twitter about not liking the videos he saw when he searched YouTube for that term. In October 2018, Hayes tweeted, “My favorite example of how informationally toxic YouTube’s algorithm is this” said Hayes. “Imagine you’re a high school freshman and got a school assignment about the Federal Reserve,” and included a link to a video with 1.6 million views. The title of the video, “Century of Enslavement: The History of the Federal Reserve,” should give an idea of the content. The fact that the video had 1.6 million views speaks to its popularity. Popularity is supposed to be part of the recipe of which videos show in search results.

 

But, since Hayes complained about it, it was brought to the attention of Google/YouTube, and “Federal Reserve” was added to the “blacklist.” Now, a search for that term returns “approved” videos favorable to the Fed.

Interestingly — and a bit closer to home for this magazine — is that in the midst of his whiny tweetfest, Hayes wrote, “It is, perhaps not surprisingly, conspiratorial quackery.

Once you view that, the algorithm also then suggests this on the sidebar: “What You're Not Supposed to Know About America’s Founding” (863,00 views).” That video — with nearly a million views at that time — is a presentation by Arthur Thompson, the CEO of this magazine’s parent organization, the John Birch Society.

 

After Hayes’ rant, Google/YouTube “fixed” the system so that relevance and popularity of clicks is out and videos which are “approved” and “politically correct” are in.

Can someone tell this writer again why anyone would trust Google/YouTube as a reliable source for searching for information? It is plain to see that by controlling the information to which people have ready access — or at least controlling the information to which people are exposed — Google/YouTube has the ability to control the way people form ideas and opinions.

They are plainly using that power to influence elections and personal ideology.

This writer decided to make a principled decision more than a year ago to stop using any Google products or services.

There are good alternatives for search, videos, maps, and everything else that Google offers. If enough people would rid themselves of Google, the company would have to make some difficult decisions about staying in the market. And even if no one else makes that decision, this writer is happily Google-free and glad not to have his thinking influenced by the “Ministry of Truth.”

Trump’s Latest Federal Reserve Board Pick Backs the Gold Standard

This article was sourced from TheNewAmerican

Is Judy Shelton the real deal?

President Trump surprised the public with his announcement last week that he will nominate Judy Shelton, a longtime Federal Reserve critic and gold standard advocate, to fill one of two open seats on the Fed’s board.

The announcement, short and to the point, was made via the president's favorite mode of communication — Twitter:

Shelton currently serves as U.S. executive director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a position to which she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in March 2018 after being nominated by President Trump.

Because Shelton has already made it through a Senate confirmation process and background check before, she may have a better chance of making it onto the Federal Reserve Board than the president’s previous two picks: conservative analyst Stephen Moore and businessman Herman Cain — both of whose names were withdrawn due to lack of Senate support.

Like Cain and Moore, Shelton is a supporter of the gold standard.

Shelton praised gold while comparing it to cryptocurrencies in a 2018 piece published by the Cato Institute.

“If the appeal of cryptocurrencies is their capacity to provide a common currency, and to maintain a uniform value for every issued unit, we need only consult historical experience to ascertain that these same qualities were achieved through the classical international gold standard,” Shelton wrote.

“In proposing a new international monetary system linked in some way to gold, America has an opportunity to secure continued prominence in global monetary affairs.”

Shelton has indicated that she would be in favor of a Bretton Woods-style conference (referring to the 1944 United Nations gathering to develop a post-World War II international monetary system) with the purpose of establishing a “convertible, gold-backed bond” as a “neutral reference point” for currencies.

“If it takes place at Mar-a-Lago, that would be great,” Shelton added.

Like the president, Shelton favors low interest rates and told the New York Times that she would like to see rates come down to nearly zero.

She has also criticized the practice of paying interest on excess reserves stored at the Fed, arguing that it incentivizes banks to “do nothing” with money instead of lending it out.

To “phase” out the practice Shelton would cut interest rates and counter any resultant inflation by selling the Fed’s holdings of Treasury securities.

Shelton blames the Federal Reserve for worsening the 2008 financial crisis.

“No other government institution had more influence over the creation of money and credit in the lead-up to the devastating 2008 global meltdown,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “And the Fed's response to the meltdown may have exacerbated the damage by lowering the incentive for banks to fund private-sector growth."

In addition, Shelton has expressed skepticism of central banks and spoken of the dangers of the politicization of the Fed.

“What concerns me is that central banks around the world, the ECB, the Bank of Japan are now buying corporate assets,” she told Fortune in 2016.

“I’m wondering how far away we are from the Fed thinking it needs to branch out and buy corporate assets. Will these corporate assets be those from firms that are politically connected?”

Shelton worked at Stanford’s Hoover Institution from 1985 to 1995. She was part of Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and served on Ben Carson’s campaign in the 2016 race before joining the Trump campaign in August 2016 and going on to serve in the Trump Treasury transition team.

The Fed critic was also director of the Sound Money Project at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that has received funding from the Koch Brothers.

But many fiscal conservatives who would agree with Shelton's position on the gold standard may disagree with her regarding her position on national borders. In 2000, Shelton penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “North America Doesn’t Need Borders,” in which she called for “open borders” between the United States and Mexico.

SEE VIDEOS

https://www.blabber.buzz/conservative-news/631511-trump-launches-long-term-strategy-against-fed-special?utm_source=c-alrt&utm_medium=c-alrt-email&utm_term=c-alrt-GI